Celia Hendricks, who’d returned wearing a baggy pair of black sweatpants, was leaning over her chair and doing some weird flips with her hair and whisper-calling Miles, who had his back to her. When he ignored her, she began launching balled-up pieces of notebook paper at his head.
“Why do you hate him so much?” I asked Tucker.
“I don’t know if ‘hate’ is the right word,” he replied. “‘Am afraid of him,’ ‘wish he’d stop staring,’ and ‘think he’s a lunatic’ are more accurate.”
“Afraid of him?”
“The whole school is.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s impossible to know what’s going on in his head.” Tucker looked back to me. “Have you ever seen a person completely change? Like, completely completely? So much that they don’t even have the same facial expressions they used to? That’s what happened to him.”
I hesitated at Tucker’s sudden seriousness. “Sounds creepy.”
“It was creepy.” Tucker concentrated on a design someone had etched into his desktop. “And then, he, you know. Had to be the best . . .”
“You . . . wait a minute . . . he’s the valedictorian?”
I knew Tucker didn’t like the valedictorian, but during his rants at work he’d never said who it was. Just that the kid didn’t deserve it.
“It’s not even that he’s beating me!” Tucker hissed, casting a quick look back at Miles. “It’s that he doesn’t try. He doesn’t even have to read the book! He just knows everything! I mean, he was sort of like that in middle school, but he was never the best. Half the time he didn’t do his work because he thought it was pointless.”
I looked back at Miles. He and Claude had apparently finished their discussion, and he’d fallen asleep on his desk. Someone had taped a paper sign to his back that said “Nazi” in black marker.
I shivered. I liked researching Nazis as much as the next war historian, but I would never use the term as a nickname. Nazis scared the daylights out of me. Either everyone at this school was an idiot, or Miles Richter really was as bad as Tucker was making him out to be.
“He has this ridiculous club, too,” Tucker said. “The East Shoal Recreational Athletics Support Club. It’s just the sort of obnoxious name he’d pick.”
I swallowed the sudden unease in my throat. I knew the club name, but I hadn’t known it was his club. The sign on Miles’s back rose and fell with his breathing.
“Um. Hey.” Tucker nudged me. “Don’t let him try to pull anything on you, okay?”
“Pull anything? Like what?”
“Like unscrewing your chair from your desk, or tearing a hole in the bottom of your backpack.”
“Ohhhkay,” I said, frowning. “You know, now I’m pretty sure he’s either a gorilla, a T-Rex, or a poltergeist. Anything else I should know about him?”
“Yeah,” Tucker said. “If he ever starts talking with a German accent, call me.”
Chapter Five
My next three classes of the day were like the first. I walked into the classrooms and spun in a circle, checking everything. If I found something strange—like a World War II–era propaganda poster on the wall—I took a picture of it. I was asked four times if my hair was dyed. My AP Macro teacher let me know it was against the rules. I told him it was natural. He didn’t believe me. I showed him the picture of my mother and my little sister, Charlie, that I always carried with me, because their hair was the same. He sort of believed me. I sat in the chair closest to the door and kept a watchful eye on him for the rest of the period.
The cafeteria was huge, so there were plenty of open spots. That was a good thing, because no one paid attention to me in the seat against the wall, picking through my food for Communist tracers. Mr. McCoy came over the PA to make another announcement about the scoreboard. People stopped talking and eating to snicker about it, but no one seemed surprised.
Miles Richter was in all of my AP classes.
My fifth period, study hall, was the only class he wasn’t in. I still wasn’t sure what Tucker had meant when he’d told me not to let Miles pull anything on me. He hadn’t done anything Tucker had warned me about, but he certainly hadn’t ignored me.
Pre-lunch, when I dropped my pencil in AP U.S. History, he kicked it to the far side of the room before I could pick it up. Because he leaned back and looked at me like, What are you going to do about it? I shoved his backpack off his desk.
In AP Government that afternoon, he “accidentally” stepped on my shoelace and I nearly fell on my face. When the teacher passed our first homework assignments down the rows, I gave Miles one that had “accidentally” been ripped in half.
In AP Chemistry, Ms. Dalton seated us in alphabetical order and handed out lab notebooks, which look like notebooks on the outside but are filled with graph paper and make you want to kill yourself. She dropped mine onto my desk with a loud THWUMP.
I kept a careful eye on the back of Miles’s neck as I wrote my name on the cover. It turned out lopsided and scratchy, but still legible. Good enough.
“I figured we’d start off the school year with a little icebreaker lab,” Mrs. Dalton said with a certain lazy cheerfulness as she returned to her desk, popped open a Diet Coke, and chugged half of it down in one go. “Nothing hard, of course. I’m going to assign lab partners and you can get to know each other.”
I suspected bad karma sneaking up on me with a nine iron. Probably because of the time I flushed Charlie’s entire line of black pawns down the toilet and told her Santa didn’t exist.
Drawing slips of paper from a beaker filled with names, Mrs. Dalton called out pairs, and I watched the desks slowly empty and partners migrate to lab tables stationed around the edge of the room.
“Alexandra Ridgemont,” Ms. Dalton said.
Karma prepared to swing.
“And Miles Richter.”
Direct hit. Results: minor concussion. May have trouble walking, seeing. Should not engage in any strenuous activity or operate heavy machinery.
I got to the lab table before Miles even left his seat. A survey paper waited for us. I checked the kids on the other side of the table—they didn’t look remotely threatening, but the worst ones were always the least threatening—the cabinets above my head, and the drain in the sink.
“Well, let’s get this over with,” I said when Miles arrived. He didn’t answer, just pulled his pen from behind his ear and flipped open his notebook. I braced my feet farther apart when it felt like the ground was skewing to the left.